Posts Tagged ‘stress’

It only seems like a couple of months ago that my Grandad died. In fact it was more than a year now, and I’m not sure where that time has gone. That was my Dad’s dad, and now a year later it feels like it won’t be long until we lose my Mum’s dad too.

The same as it was with my Horrible Grandad, my Nice Grandad is nearly 90 now and in the last few months his health has suddenly just started to fail. He’s lived in the same house, the house my Mum grew up in, for something like 60 years, and for the last 30 of those he’s lived alone and managed all by himself. But he just can’t do it any more. Unfortunately he hasn’t wanted to accept that he was starting to need help and starting to need to make changes to his home so he could carry on living there, and now everything has suddenly gone crunch and there’s nothing been put in place to help him. And it’s SO stressful because no one knows what to do for him.

He lives in Hertfordshire about an hour from my Mum and Dad, and my Mum’s sister lives in Canada. Mum’s obviously ill so can’t do very much, and my Dad is having trouble with his heart again and isn’t meant to be over-exerting himself. So there’s no one really that is very nearby. They knew Grandad was starting to get more frail, so Mum has tried for about a year to convince him to make provision, to get a stairlift and to consider that he might need someone to come in regularly like a carer or district nurse or something to check on him, but he just wouldn’t have any of it.

And now what’s happened? He can’t really manage the stairs, he can’t clean his house, he can’t get his shopping on his own. He just can’t be on his own really. It’s all deteriorated so quickly. Why does it have to happen like that with old people? They get something wrong with them, and suddenly they get something else too, and something else, and their body just can’t cope. Everything gives way all at once.

So now I’ve got my Mum on the phone several times a week at the end of her tether with worry about him, and I just don’t know what to say to her. She feels bad because she can’t do more for him, and my aunt feels bad for being so far away and puts pressure on my Mum to do more than she can. I’m about two or three hours from Hertfordshire, so I don’t feel like I can realistically do much myself, and we’re all just talking about how difficult it is and not actually fixing anything.

I just don’t know what to do. If he won’t even allow them to arrange for a carer or anything, what are we supposed to do? He doesn’t want help even though he needs it, and you can’t force him. You can’t kick his door in and install a stairlift and a carer. We’re all just stuck in a horrible stressful limbo and it feels dreadful.

I’m writing this at 3.30am on the day of our move. I haven’t slept tonight yet, because I’ve got too much going round in my head, so at the moment I’m facing moving home on no sleep at all. Chris’ Dad is due to arrive here to start the move in four hours. Fuck.

I’m feeling really stressed, and at the moment I don’t want to move at all. When I collected our keys today, there were lots of little things that I didn’t like about the new flat, things I hadn’t noticed before, and although they’re pretty much all quite minor they made me freak out a bit. There are just various bits of it that are quite shabby, or are broken, or weren’t how I was expecting, and it made me want to cling to what I have already simply because it’s familiar and safe.

You could hear people clumping around through the ceiling too, and that upset me a bit. I wanted the new place to be quiet, to feel like I was away from other people. A stupid hope really, considering it’s a flat in busy Brighton. Chris said the clumping noise probably won’t be as noticeable once we’re not standing in a silent, empty flat, with no furnishings to absorb any of it. He’s probably right, but my head’s too all over the place at the moment to agree.

A huge, huge worry that we both now have on top of this is that our brand new sofa, that we have ordered at huge expense to arrive on Friday, will not fit down the stairs to the property. I had considered the doorways when I ordered it, and they should be fine, but I had no recollection at all of how narrow the stairs are. The bedroom windows bow out into them as you go down, and so for a long stretch they are literally only 65cm across. And that is really rather fucking narrow for large furniture items to pass through. I’ve even had to dismantle our dining table this evening before we move it, because I couldn’t see how else we’d get it down there.

What the fuck do I do if the sofa won’t fit? What will the delivery men do? Will they just dump it on the pavement and go? I’ve read things about sofa delivery men doing that. You’re meant to have measured, if it doesn’t fit it’s your fault not theirs, they don’t do returns just because you’re too much of a cock to have worked out if you can get the sofa inside or not.

Chris and I are clinging to the hope that with the packing off and the cushions off, the sofa will be just about wigglable through the gap. It might, it very nearly might, but it’s an unusual shape and I’m really not convinced. I’m so scared we’ve wasted all that money.

The people living there before us had two sofas in their front room. How did they get them in and out? They weren’t such an odd shape though, and maybe the arms could come off or something. I don’t know. I’m really scared.

I was meant to be at home on my own when the sofa comes on Friday, but I’m really hoping Chris can take the day off with me, even if he has to pull a sicky, so I don’t have to deal with it on my own if it won’t fit. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

I’m so tired, and so stressed, and so disappointed not to be excited about the flat. I hope it feels better and nicer once we’re in and our furniture is in (if any of it fits). Chris is sad that I’m not pleased with it, and I’m dragging him down. One day he’ll leave me for being such hard work, and such a miserable fuck. I need to hold on to that thought and bury my stress deep down inside me. We’re moving, and I can’t stop it, and we’re moving for good reasons, and the place should be nice once we’re in and we’ve made it nice. We’re moving. But at the moment I really really don’t want to.

We’re moooooooooooooooooooooooooving! We exchanged contracts yesterday afternoon and now we are absolutely definitely moving and it can’t fall through. Or rather it can fall through but it would cost so much money in penalties that it’s not very likely.

So hooray! Now I can actually allow myself to think about the new place without having to add on little caveats in my head all the time like “as long as it doesn’t fall through”, “if all goes well”, “assuming we do buy it” etc etc.

And mostly I am thinking fuuuuuuuuuuuuck I hope it’s all alright! I hope the flat is still nice when we see it again, and I hope there aren’t any huge problems with it that we and the surveyor somehow missed, and I really really hope it’s not a noisy place to live. They’ve said quite categorically “we never hear the neighbours”, but I know you can’t really trust a seller to tell you the whole story. If we get there and it’s really noisy I’m going to be devastated though…

But anyway, I always assume the worst case scenario will be true, and I need to stop it. As everyone keeps saying to me, I’m sure it will be FINE. And it’ll be our own place, and there will be no landlord, and we can make it nice, and we’ll be proper grown ups.

We’re completing on 13 July, and we’re going to move our stuff on the 14th. So in less than three weeks we should be living there. It feels weird to think that we’ll be living somewhere else; we’ve been in our rented flat for almost eight years, ever since we moved out of our final student house in 2003. In lots of ways I don’t like the flat any more – it’s quite noisy, it’s not very big, and it needs redecorating – but it has also been my home for a very long time. The only place I have lived in for longer is my childhood home where we stayed until I was 13. Even the house my parents live in now I was only at for five years.

We never intended to stay put for eight years like this; it just happened, due to convenience and house prices and things. So this will be the start of a whole new chapter for us. I hope it’s a good one.

We’ll be buying lots of new furniture, because again we’ve had half our stuff for eight years or more, the other half belongs to our landlord, and the stuff we bought was really rather cheap. Can you believe we got our sofabed from Ikea for £35? We’re thrifty, we are.

That should be quite nice though, because everything will be new, and I’m hoping it will make the flat look all swish. I want people to walk in and say “Wow it’s lovely, I wish my place was this nice”. That’s what I want, the jealousy of my friends. It’s all I live for.

I’m freaking out a bit about the amount of work to do before and during the move, sorting out all our changes of addresses and utilities and whatnot, but I expect we’ll get there in the end. Other people manage it, and lots of people are quite thick, so it can’t be that hard.

It’s exciting anyway, and it’s nice to know it’s definitely happening. People have been asking if we’re having a house warming party, and my answer is no. NO ONE TOUCHES ANYTHING IN THE NEW FLAT. That will be the rule. I want to keep it nice, after all.

I’m finding buying a flat rather stressy, and I honestly don’t know how people who don’t work in office jobs where they can take phone calls and do emails manage it. It must take absolutely FOREVER if you have to try and do all the things involved with it during your lunch break and in the evenings. I’ll admit that I think we’ve progressed quite far quite fast in the last couple of weeks, not least because I’m lucky enough to have a friend doing the conveyancing who seems to be burning through everything in a manner I’m sure most lawyers wouldn’t. But our progress is also in part due to the amount of time I’ve spent on it, and I’m finding the whole thing quite draining and frustrating.

Since I last blogged about this nearly two weeks ago, we have had the survey done, finished all the mortgage application stuff and got final approval for the loan, and done draft contracts and deeds and stuff on the legal side. I’m just waiting for the contracts to come in the post. I think all we’ve really got left to do is get the results of all the searches back and check there are no problems with those, resolve any questions and issues that we have over the contracts, and then we’ll probably be ready to exchange once the other party is. I think the searches will take a while though, and in fact I’m grateful for that because I could do with a breather and some time to absorb all that’s happening. The pace of it has not helped with my stress levels at all, and nor has my mobile ringing two or three times a day with stupid mortgage people or surveyors on the other end of it.

In some ways I think I’m a bit resentful that I have to do all of this while Chris doesn’t really have to do any and can just read and sign the stuff I give him, and listen to my digest of the day’s progress each evening. It’s not his fault, he can’t actually do any of it, because he works pretty much uninterrupted from the time he arrives at school to the time he leaves, and he can’t take phone calls and things there. So it has to be me really, and I do understand that, but I wouldn’t mind being able to share the stress and the faff out a bit more.

I’m a bit annoyed with the sellers too, because I don’t actually think they’ve looked after some of the built in stuff like the gas appliances very well (not had them serviced, etc.) and it just adds an extra thing to think about. My Mum would say “well you should tell them to get them serviced before you’ll proceed with the sale”, but I find that quite difficult to do. Would we actually withdraw from the sale if they said they didn’t want to do it? No, probably not. And I’m sure they know that too, so why would they want to pay to have it serviced when they’re leaving? And servicing the boiler and the gas fire would probably only cost about £120, so it seems like a bit of a small amount of money in the great scheme of things to be worried about. We could just service them ourselves when we move in. But then what if there’s something more seriously wrong with the appliances that only comes to light during the service?

See what I mean? You can go round in circles being unsure what to do, and I’ve never had to do any of this before, so it gets really stressy and I feel very unsure. And I don’t like feeling unsure, so I get snappy with Chris, and it’s all very unhelpful.

And don’t even get me started on the enormity of actually moving. I can’t even think about that yet. I made a list the other day of at least 45 companies and organisations I’ll have to let know the new address, plus there’s all the packing and hiring a van and all that stuff. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Staying in our rented flat just seems to easy sometimes, and if I hadn’t already shelled out more than a thousand pounds on the cost of the move I’d be seriously tempted.

Oh anyway, this post is boring now. I’d advise you not to read it (too late though, sorry). Maybe once this is all over I’ll be able to think “all that was worth it in the end”. I fucking better.

God, I’ve been so busy this last week that I haven’t even had time to write on here. The wedding is now TWO days away, or 52 hours.

Mum has now kicked into major freak out mode and is stressing to the point that it’s making her ill, so I spent quite a bit of time on the phone to her last night helping to get her grounded again. She’s basically said she’s not going to be at any of the reception now, and will have to eat in her room or something. That’s probably a knee-jerk reaction, because she won’t know how she feels until the actual day and time, but I think she’s basically trying to set me up for a worst case scenario. I’ve already told her I don’t mind, several times in fact, but she still needs constant reassurance. She’s stressing about the journey, about what time to leave, about what food she’ll want and be able to get when she’s here, about the ceremony, about the reception, even about washing her hair before she comes. What can you say to that apart from make soothing noises and mostly useless things like “just try to do one bit at a time”? Her stress and anxiety contributes to her illness more than anything else half the time.

So anyway, that bummed me out last night and made me feel like I’m not looking forward to the wedding at all, which is really very sad when it’s my wedding day and it’s the only one I’m going to get. Probably, there’s always divorce I suppose, he has got weird feet.

And then Chris and I had a chat about it, which upset me because I know I’m having an effect on him and his ability to enjoy it all. Although he’s quite resilient and is likely just to say “well I’M going to enjoy myself”. But I do feel like I’m letting him down. He basically tried to remind me that I need to step back from Mum for this, as hard and as unusual as that is for me – otherwise I won’t be able to enjoy it, and I’ll likely regret it. I need to trust my Dad and brother to look after her, but it’s hard because I don’t really trust anyone to do anything; I just want to do everything myself so I know it’s done properly, and more importantly so that I know I’ve done all I can.

Oh well anyway. It’s Wednesday now, not long to go at all. I’m off work now for two and a half weeks, which is nice, and I’ve been getting on with some of my initial chores from the last stage of wedding preparation. I’ve been to Moss Bros to check my suit fits OK (and in doing so, to check our suits are there and ready), and it does and they are. So that’s good, my pigeon chest isn’t well suited to off-the-peg clothes half the time. I might pop round to the music equipment shop in a minute to ask a couple of contrived and relatively unimportant questions, but which will also allow me to check they haven’t forgotten our booking either. And then I need to blitz the flat so it’s clean for Chris’ cousins, and phone the two hotels in America to make sure they’ve still got our reservations too. So much to do already, and today is meant to be the “slow build up” day!

I am starting to get well stressy about the wedding now. It’s only two weeks away and suddenly it seems very very real and very very close. I don’t think I’m stressed about any one thing in particular, it’s more a general worry about the overall event and everything going right and everyone finding their way there and enjoying themselves.

And my Mum of course, she’s a big source of stress for me at the moment. I’m still slightly concerned that she won’t actually make it, because that’s always a possibility with her with any event. She hasn’t said anything of course, we’re both just assuming she’ll get down here and it’ll be OK, but I think we both know it’s a possibility. And even once she is here, she’ll be knackered from the journey, and then the next day she’s got to manage the whole wedding. So I’m worried that the walk to the Town Hall will be too far, that she’ll feel ill in the ceremony, that if the one baby that’s coming cries through the whole thing it’ll throw her into a tizzy, and even after all that she’s got to pose for photos and walk back to the hotel. And I’m not even meant to be worrying about her, I’m meant to be enjoying the day! I can’t really talk to Chris about it any more, because he usually says something like “you can’t be fussing over her all day, we’ve got a whole wedding you need to pay attention to”. Which is true, and Mum has said that as well, but it doesn’t stop me worrying. I’ve asked my brother to try to look after her on the day so I don’t have to, I suppose I’ll just have to hope that works out OK.

But what if she doesn’t end up coming? How crappy would that be? I’ve got very little family coming as it is… I assume Dad would probably come still if she didn’t, unless he didn’t want to abandon her at home on her own. So I’ll end up with my only family being my Dad, brother and sister-in-law, or maybe even just the latter two. And everyone will be going “where’s Simon’s Mum?” all day. God… well, she’ll probably just force herself to come, I can’t see her wanting to miss it any more than I would want her to.

I also tried, initially unsuccessfully, to look up some tips on the internet on coping with wedding stress. And they were all about bloody women! Things like “play soothing music in the car on the way to the ceremony, keep the air conditioning on so you don’t feel hot, but don’t open the window because it’ll mess your hair up”. Well, we aren’t having cars, our car doesn’t have air conditioning anyway, and my hair is generally gelled and impervious to all forms of attack. So that was useless! But I have just now found a few better tips about not getting yourself worked up with negative self-talk, e.g. this blog post, and JUST SAYING NO. When people say “are you doing this? are we having that?”, instead of thinking “shit we need to do that now”, the answer should be “NO WE ARE NOT”. Perhaps followed by a glare, and/or a punch in the kidneys. I feel better already.

The wedding is creeping up really fast now, only six and a half weeks to go (M-Day stood for marriage day, by the way, and was also a vague reference to X-Men comics for all you geeks out there).

Things are progressing fairly well I suppose, but I’m still getting more and more stressed about it. And I haven’t helped myself by looking on Trip Advisor just now for reviews of the hotel we’re having the reception at and where our families are staying. Now, don’t get me wrong, I take reviews on that site a little with a pinch of salt, as usually only people who’ve had a really bad experience care enough to write on it, and everyone else has a perfectly fine time and never writes anything. BUT, there were some very bad reviews to be found, particularly around the noise levels. Which is not unexpected I suppose, given where it is – on the seafront, with one side facing East Street where there are several bars and a club. And I’m sort of hoping that most of us who will be staying there will be going to bed fairly late anyway, so the impact will be fairly minimal.

That will not, however, apply to my mother, who I fully expect to have retired upstairs by 9pm at the latest. So I’ve asked more than once in an OCD-checking kind of way that they be allocated a quiet room, AWAY from East Street. Which they’ve said they’ll do, to be fair, so I’m hoping it’ll be OK. I cannot deal with her having a paddy because she’s had no sleep, or even worse saying she doesn’t feel well enough to come to the ceremony/reception because of lack of sleep. I’ll just be stressing out the whole time.

A further little problem I’ve just found out about, which I’m a bit afraid to tell Chris because I know his Dad’s been asking in a keen sort of way, is that for the guests staying overnight there, you can’t check in before 2.30pm. And the ceremony is at 3pm. Why is nothing simple??? Why is it so late?? I know they’ve got a lot of rooms to clean etc etc but that’s going to be really unhelpful, as I was hoping we could get ready at the hotel. Mum and Dad’ll be alright as they’re arriving the day before, but most are arriving on the day. Oh bollocks, and I’ve just remembered that we’ll have hire suits for our brothers and Dads, so where are they going to get changed? I was thinking “oh they’ll just have to get ready before they come to Brighton, drive down and come to the ceremony, and check in later” but they can’t if they haven’t got their suits! Damn damn damn!

And it’s not like six people can get dressed in my parent’s room, not with my Mum ‘needing to rest’, and even our flat is going to be a problem because Chris’ cousins are staying there!! Nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! OK maybe we should just cancel. Or move the whole wedding to a nice quiet hotel in the country where there’s parking and the rooms are available from 12pm. Although then all the non-resident guests have to figure out how to get home so that doesn’t work either. How do people ever manage to get married??

Oh god this is going to be well annoying to sort out… And parking’s going to be a problem, I can’t even think about that at the moment.